the humour of satire; it may be savage as in Swift, with a moral object,
or sedate, as in Gibbon, with a malicious. The foppish irony fretting to
be seen, and the irony which leers, that you shall not mistake its
intention, are failures in satiric effort pretending to the treasures of
ambiguity.
The Humourist of mean order is a refreshing laugher, giving tone to the
feelings and sometimes allowing the feelings to be too much for him. But
the humourist of high has an embrace of contrasts beyond the scope of the
Comic poet.
Heart and mind laugh out at Don Quixote, and still you brood on him. The
juxtaposition of the knight and squire is a Comic conception, the
opposition of their natures most humorous. They are as different as the
two hemispheres in the time of Columbus, yet they touch and are bound in
one by laughter. The knight's great aims and constant mishaps, his
chivalrous valiancy exercised on absurd objects, his good sense along the
highroad of the craziest of expeditions; the compassion he plucks out of
derision, and the admirable figure he preserves while stalking through
the frantically grotesque and burlesque assailing him, are in the
loftiest moods of humour, fusing the Tragic sentiment with the Comic
narrative.
The stroke of the great humourist is world-wide, with lights of Tragedy
in his laughter.
Taking a living great, though not creative, humourist to guide our
description: the skull of Yorick is in his hands in our seasons of
festival; he sees visions of primitive man capering preposterously under
the gorgeous robes of ceremonial. Our souls must be on fire when we wear
solemnity, if we would not press upon his shrewdest nerve. Finite and
infinite flash from one to the other with him, lending him a two-edged
thought that peeps out of his peacefullest lines by fits, like the
lantern of the fire-watcher at windows, going the rounds at night. The
comportment and performances of men in society are to him, by the vivid
comparison with their mortality, more grotesque than respectable. But
ask yourself, Is he always to be relied on for justness? He will fly
straight as the emissary eagle back to Jove at the true Hero. He will
also make as determined a swift descent upon the man of his wilful
choice, whom we cannot distinguish as a true one. This vast power of
his, built up of the feelings and the intellect in union, is often
wanting in proportion and in discretion. Humourists touching upon
History or Society are given to be capricious. They are, as in the case
of Sterne, given to be sentimental; for with them the feelings are
primary, as with singers. Comedy, on the other hand, is an
interpretation of the general mind, and is for that reason of necessity
kept in restraint. The French lay marked stress on _mesure et gout_, and
they own how much they owe to Moliere for leading them in simple justness
and taste. We can teach them many things; they can teach us in this.
The Comic poet is in the narrow field, or enclosed square, of the society
he depicts; and he addresses the still narrower enclosure of men's
intellects, with reference to the operation of the social world upon
their characters. He is not concerned with beginnings or endings or
surroundings, but with what you are now weaving. To understand his work
and value it, you must have a sober liking of your kind and a sober
estimate of our civilized qualities. The aim and business of the Comic
poet are misunderstood, his meaning is not seized nor his point of view
taken, when he is accused of dishonouring our nature and being hostile to
sentiment, tending to spitefulness and making an unfair use of laughter.
Those who detect irony in Comedy do so because they choose to see it in
life. Poverty, says the satirist, has nothing harder in itself than that
it makes men ridiculous. But poverty is never ridiculous to Comic
perception until it attempts to make its rags conceal its bareness in a
forlorn attempt at decency, or foolishly to rival ostentation. Caleb
Balderstone, in his endeavour to keep up the honour of a noble household
in a state of beggary, is an exquisitely comic character. In the case of
'poor relatives,' on the other hand, it is the rich, whom they perplex,
that are really comic; and to laugh at the former, not seeing the comedy
of the latter, is to betray dulness of vision. Humourist and Satirist
frequently hunt together as Ironeists in pursuit of the grotesque, to the
exclusion of the Comic. That was an affecting moment in the history of
the Prince Regent, when the First Gentleman of Europe burst into tears at
a sarcastic remark of Beau Brummell's on the cut of his coat. Humour,
Satire, Irony, pounce on it altogether as their common prey. The Comic
spirit eyes but does not touch it. Put into action, it would be
farcical. It is too gross for Comedy.
Incidents of a kind casting ridicule on our unfortunate nature instead of
our conventional life, provoke derisive laughter, which thwarts the Comic
idea. But derision is foiled by the play of the intellect. Most of
doubtful causes in contest are open to Comic interpretation, and any
intellectual pleading of a doubtful cause contains germs of an Idea of
Comedy.
The laughter of satire is a blow in the back or the face. The laughter
of Comedy is impersonal and of unrivalled politeness, nearer a smile;
often no more than a smile. It laughs through the mind, for the mind
directs it; and it might be called the humour of the mind.
One excellent test of the civilization of a country, as I have said, I
take to be the flourishing of the Comic idea and Comedy; and the test of
true Comedy is that it shall awaken thoughtful laughter.
If you believe that our civilization is founded in common-sense (and it
is the first condition of sanity to believe it), you will, when
contemplating men, discern a Spirit overhead; not more heavenly than the
light flashed upward from glassy surfaces, but luminous and watchful;
never shooting beyond them, nor lagging in the rear; so closely attached
to them that it may be taken for a slavish reflex, until its features are
studied. It has the sage's brows, and the sunny malice of a faun lurks
at the corners of the half-closed lips drawn in an idle wariness of half
tension. That slim feasting smile, shaped like the long-bow, was once a
big round satyr's laugh, that flung up the brows like a fortress lifted
by gunpowder. The laugh will come again, but it will be of the order of
the smile, finely tempered, showing sunlight of the mind, mental richness
rather than noisy enormity. Its common aspect is one of unsolicitous
observation, as if surveying a full field and having leisure to dart on
its chosen morsels, without any fluttering eagerness. Men's future upon
earth does not attract it; their honesty and shapeliness in the present
does; and whenever they wax out of proportion, overblown, affected,
pretentious, bombastical, hypocritical, pedantic, fantastically delicate;
whenever it sees them self-deceived or hoodwinked, given to run riot in
idolatries, drifting into vanities, congregating in absurdities, planning
short-sightedly, plotting dementedly; whenever they are at variance with
their professions, and violate the unwritten but perceptible laws binding
them in consideration one to another; whenever they offend sound reason,
fair justice; are false in humility or mined with conceit, individually,
or in the bulk--the Spirit overhead will look humanely malign and cast an
oblique light on them, followed by volleys of silvery laughter. That is
the Comic Spirit.
Not to distinguish it is to be bull-blind to the spiritual, and to deny
the existence of a mind of man where minds of men are in working
conjunction.
You must, as I have said, believe that our state of society is founded in
common-sense, otherwise you will not be struck by the contrasts the Comic
Spirit perceives, or have it to look to for your consolation. You will,
in fact, be standing in that peculiar oblique beam of light, yourself
illuminated to the general eye as the very object of chase and doomed
quarry of the thing obscure to you. But to feel its presence and to see
it is your assurance that many sane and solid minds are with you in what
you are experiencing: and this of itself spares you the pain of satirical
heat, and the bitter craving to strike heavy blows. You share the
sublime of wrath, that would not have hurt the foolish, but merely
demonstrate their foolishness. Moliere was contented to revenge himself
on the critics of the Ecole des Femmes, by writing the Critique de
l'Ecole des Femmes, one of the wisest as well as the playfullest of
studies in criticism. A perception of the comic spirit gives high
fellowship. You become a citizen of the selecter world, the highest we
know of in connection with our old world, which is not supermundane. Look
there for your unchallengeable upper class! You feel that you are one of
this our civilized community, that you cannot escape from it, and would
not if you could. Good hope sustains you; weariness does not overwhelm
you; in isolation you see no charms for vanity; personal pride is greatly
moderated. Nor shall your title of citizenship exclude you from worlds
of imagination or of devotion. The Comic spirit is not hostile to the
sweetest songfully poetic. Chaucer bubbles with it: Shakespeare
overflows: there is a mild moon's ray of it (pale with super-refinement
through distance from our flesh and blood planet) in Comus. Pope has it,
and it is the daylight side of the night half obscuring Cowper. It is
only hostile to the priestly element, when that, by baleful swelling,
transcends and overlaps the bounds of its office: and then, in extreme
cases, it is too true to itself to speak, and veils the lamp: as, for
example, the spectacle of Bossuet over the dead body of Moliere: at which
the dark angels may, but men do not laugh.
We have had comic pulpits, for a sign that the laughter-moving and the
worshipful may be in alliance: I know not how far comic, or how much
assisted in seeming so by the unexpectedness and the relief of its
appearance: at least they are popular, they are said to win the ear.
Laughter is open to perversion, like other good things; the scornful and
the brutal sorts are not unknown to us; but the laughter directed by the
Comic spirit is a harmless wine, conducing to sobriety in the degree that
it enlivens. It enters you like fresh air into a study; as when one of
the sudden contrasts of the comic idea floods the brain like reassuring
daylight. You are cognizant of the true kind by feeling that you take it
in, savour it, and have what flowers live on, natural air for food. That
which you give out--the joyful roar--is not the better part; let that go
to good fellowship and the benefit of the lungs. Aristophanes promises
his auditors that if they will retain the ideas of the comic poet
carefully, as they keep dried fruits in boxes, their garments shall smell
odoriferous of wisdom throughout the year. The boast will not be thought
an empty one by those who have choice friends that have stocked
themselves according to his directions. Such treasuries of sparkling
laughter are wells in our desert. Sensitiveness to the comic laugh is a
step in civilization. To shrink from being an object of it is a step in
cultivation. We know the degree of refinement in men by the matter they
will laugh at, and the ring of the laugh; but we know likewise that the
larger natures are distinguished by the great breadth of their power of
laughter, and no one really loving Moliere is refined by that love to
despise or be dense to Aristophanes, though it may be that the lover of
Aristophanes will not have risen to the height of Moliere. Embrace them
both, and you have the whole scale of laughter in your breast. Nothing
in the world surpasses in stormy fun the scene in The Frogs, when Bacchus
and Xanthias receive their thrashings from the hands of businesslike
OEacus, to discover which is the divinity of the two, by his
imperviousness to the mortal condition of pain, and each, under the
obligation of not crying out, makes believe that his horrible bellow--the
god's _iou iou_ being the lustier--means only the stopping of a sneeze,
or horseman sighted, or the prelude to an invocation to some deity: and
the slave contrives that the god shall get the bigger lot of blows.
Passages of Rabelais, one or two in Don Quixote, and the Supper in the
Manner of the Ancients, in Peregrine Pickle, are of a similar cataract of
laughter. But it is not illuminating; it is not the laughter of the
mind. Moliere's laughter, in his purest comedies, is ethereal, as light
to our nature, as colour to our thoughts. The Misanthrope and the
Tartuffe have no audible laughter; but the characters are steeped in the
comic spirit. They quicken the mind through laughter, from coming out of
the mind; and the mind accepts them because they are clear
interpretations of certain chapters of the Book lying open before us all.
Between these two stand Shakespeare and Cervantes, with the richer laugh
of heart and mind in one; with much of the Aristophanic robustness,
something of Moliere's delicacy.
* * * * *
The laughter heard in circles not pervaded by the Comic idea, will sound
harsh and soulless, like versified prose, if you step into them with a
sense of the distinction. You will fancy you have changed your
habitation to a planet remoter from the sun. You may be among powerful
brains too. You will not find poets--or but a stray one,
over-worshipped. You will find learned men undoubtedly, professors,
reputed philosophers, and illustrious dilettanti. They have in them,
perhaps, every element composing light, except the Comic. They read
verse, they discourse of art; but their eminent faculties are not under
that vigilant sense of a collective supervision, spiritual and present,
which we have taken note of. They build a temple of arrogance; they
speak much in the voice of oracles; their hilarity, if it does not dip in
grossness, is usually a form of pugnacity.
Insufficiency of sight in the eye looking outward has deprived them of
the eye that should look inward. They have never weighed themselves in
the delicate balance of the Comic idea so as to obtain a suspicion of the
rights and dues of the world; and they have, in consequence, an irritable
personality. A very learned English professor crushed an argument in a
political discussion, by asking his adversary angrily: 'Are you aware,
sir, that I am a philologer?'
The practice of polite society will help in training them, and the
professor on a sofa with beautiful ladies on each side of him, may become
their pupil and a scholar in manners without knowing it: he is at least a
fair and pleasing spectacle to the Comic Muse. But the society named
polite is volatile in its adorations, and to-morrow will be petting a
bronzed soldier, or a black African, or a prince, or a spiritualist:
ideas cannot take root in its ever-shifting soil. It is besides addicted
in self-defence to gabble exclusively of the affairs of its rapidly
revolving world, as children on a whirligoround bestow their attention on
the wooden horse or cradle ahead of them, to escape from giddiness and
preserve a notion of identity. The professor is better out of a circle
that often confounds by lionizing, sometimes annoys by abandoning, and
always confuses. The school that teaches gently what peril there is lest
a cultivated head should still be coxcomb's, and the collisions which may
befall high-soaring minds, empty or full, is more to be recommended than
the sphere of incessant motion supplying it with material.
Lands where the Comic spirit is obscure overhead are rank with raw crops
of matter. The traveller accustomed to smooth highways and people not
covered with burrs and prickles is amazed, amid so much that is fair and
cherishable, to come upon such curious barbarism. An Englishman paid a
visit of admiration to a professor in the Land of Culture, and was
introduced by him to another distinguished professor, to whom he took so
cordially as to walk out with him alone one afternoon. The first
professor, an erudite entirely worthy of the sentiment of scholarly
esteem prompting the visit, behaved (if we exclude the dagger) with the
vindictive jealousy of an injured Spanish beauty. After a short prelude
of gloom and obscure explosions, he discharged upon his faithless admirer
the bolts of passionate logic familiar to the ears of flighty
caballeros:--'Either I am a fit object of your admiration, or I am not.
Of these things one--either you are competent to judge, in which case I
stand condemned by you; or you are incompetent, and therefore
impertinent, and you may betake yourself to your country again,
hypocrite!' The admirer was for persuading the wounded scholar that it
is given to us to be able to admire two professors at a time. He was
driven forth.
Perhaps this might have occurred in any country, and a comedy of The
Pedant, discovering the greedy humanity within the dusty scholar, would
not bring it home to one in particular. I am mindful that it was in
Germany, when I observe that the Germans have gone through no comic
training to warn them of the sly, wise emanation eyeing them from aloft,
nor much of satirical. Heinrich Heine has not been enough to cause them
to smart and meditate. Nationally, as well as individually, when they
are excited they are in danger of the grotesque, as when, for instance,
they decline to listen to evidence, and raise a national outcry because
one of German blood has been convicted of crime in a foreign country.
They are acute critics, yet they still wield clubs in controversy.
Compare them in this respect with the people schooled in La Bruyere, La
Fontaine, Moliere; with the people who have the figures of a Trissotin
and a Vadius before them for a comic warning of the personal vanities of
the caressed professor. It is more than difference of race. It is the
difference of traditions, temper, and style, which comes of schooling.
The French controversialist is a polished swordsman, to be dreaded in his
graces and courtesies. The German is Orson, or the mob, or a marching
army, in defence of a good case or a bad--a big or a little. His irony
is a missile of terrific tonnage: sarcasm he emits like a blast from a
dragon's mouth. He must and will be Titan. He stamps his foe underfoot,
and is astonished that the creature is not dead, but stinging; for, in
truth, the Titan is contending, by comparison, with a god.
When the Germans lie on their arms, looking across the Alsatian frontier
at the crowds of Frenchmen rushing to applaud L'ami Fritz at the Theatre
Francais, looking and considering the meaning of that applause, which is
grimly comic in its political response to the domestic moral of the
play--when the Germans watch and are silent, their force of character
tells. They are kings in music, we may say princes in poetry, good
speculators in philosophy, and our leaders in scholarship. That so
gifted a race, possessed moreover of the stern good sense which collects
the waters of laughter to make the wells, should show at a disadvantage,
I hold for a proof, instructive to us, that the discipline of the comic
spirit is needful to their growth. We see what they can reach to in that
great figure of modern manhood, Goethe. They are a growing people; they
are conversable as well; and when their men, as in France, and at
intervals at Berlin tea-tables, consent to talk on equal terms with their
women, and to listen to them, their growth will be accelerated and be
shapelier. Comedy, or in any form the Comic spirit, will then come to
them to cut some figures out of the block, show them the mirror, enliven
and irradiate the social intelligence.
Modern French comedy is commendable for the directness of the study of
actual life, as far as that, which is but the early step in such a
scholarship, can be of service in composing and colouring the picture. A
consequence of this crude, though well-meant, realism is the collision of
the writers in their scenes and incidents, and in their characters. The
Muse of most of them is an _Aventuriere_. She is clever, and a certain
diversion exists in the united scheme for confounding her. The object of
this person is to reinstate herself in the decorous world; and either,
having accomplished this purpose through deceit, she has a _nostalgie de
la boue_, that eventually casts her back into it, or she is exposed in
her course of deception when she is about to gain her end. A very good,
innocent young man is her victim, or a very astute, goodish young man
obstructs her path. This latter is enabled to be the champion of the
decorous world by knowing the indecorous well. He has assisted in the
progress of Aventurieres downward; he will not help them to ascend. The
world is with him; and certainly it is not much of an ascension they
aspire to; but what sort of a figure is he? The triumph of a candid
realism is to show him no hero. You are to admire him (for it must be
supposed that realism pretends to waken some admiration) as a credibly
living young man; no better, only a little firmer and shrewder, than the
rest. If, however, you think at all, after the curtain has fallen, you
are likely to think that the Aventurieres have a case to plead against
him. True, and the author has not said anything to the contrary; he has
but painted from the life; he leaves his audience to the reflections of
unphilosophic minds upon life, from the specimen he has presented in the
bright and narrow circle of a spy-glass.
I do not know that the fly in amber is of any particular use, but the
Comic idea enclosed in a comedy makes it more generally perceptible and
portable, and that is an advantage. There is a benefit to men in taking
the lessons of Comedy in congregations, for it enlivens the wits; and to
writers it is beneficial, for they must have a clear scheme, and even if
they have no idea to present, they must prove that they have made the
public sit to them before the sitting to see the picture. And writing
for the stage would be a corrective of a too-incrusted scholarly style,
into which some great ones fall at times. It keeps minor writers to a
definite plan, and to English. Many of them now swelling a plethoric
market, in the composition of novels, in pun-manufactories and in
journalism; attached to the machinery forcing perishable matter on a
public that swallows voraciously and groans; might, with encouragement,
be attending to the study of art in literature. Our critics appear to be
fascinated by the quaintness of our public, as the world is when our
beast-garden has a new importation of magnitude, and the creatures
appetite is reverently consulted. They stipulate for a writer's
popularity before they will do much more than take the position of
umpires to record his failure or success. Now the pig supplies the most
popular of dishes, but it is not accounted the most honoured of animals,
unless it be by the cottager. Our public might surely be led to try
other, perhaps finer, meat. It has good taste in song. It might be
taught as justly, on the whole, and the sooner when the cottager's view
of the feast shall cease to be the humble one of our literary critics, to
extend this capacity for delicate choosing in the direction of the matter
arousing laughter.
FOOTNOTES
{1} A lecture delivered at the London Institution, February 1st, 1877.
{2} Realism in the writing is carried to such a pitch in THE OLD
BACHELOR, that husband and wife use imbecile connubial epithets to one
another.
{3} Tallemant des Reaux, in his rough portrait of the Duke, shows the
foundation of the character of Alceste.
{4} See Tom Jones, book viii. chapter I, for Fielding's opinion of our
Comedy. But he puts it simply; not as an exercise in the
quasi-philosophical bathetic.
{5} Femmes Savantes:
BELISE: Veux-tu toute la vie offenser la grammaire?
MARTINE: Qui parle d'offenser grand'mere ni grand-pere?'
The pun is delivered in all sincerity, from the mouth of a rustic.
{6} Maskwell seems to have been carved on the model of Iago, as by the
hand of an enterprising urchin. He apostrophizes his 'invention'
repeatedly. 'Thanks, my invention.' He hits on an invention, to say:
'Was it my brain or Providence? no matter which.' It is no matter which,
but it was not his brain.
{7} Imaginary Conversations: Alfieri and the Jew Salomon.